Lea Ryan's splendiferous journal of semi-coherent ramblings

Monthly Archives: August 2016

The last few days have been crazy and weird, good but not all good. Over the weekend, we adopted a new kitten, had a car break down, and our basement flooded. The flood and the car weren’t too bad. The car issue was quickly resolved. The basement flood was not. We still have some very wet carpet.

And it’s still raining, so my whole life feels a little waterlogged at the moment. Drive to work in the rain, listen to the rain all day, drive home in the rain, worry about wet basement when I get home. Rain, rain, rain. I think I need an ark.

The new baby is very sweet. We picked him up from the animal shelter in Indy on Friday. They were overcrowded and having a special. We have been thinking about getting a new cat anyway, so this was a good opportunity.

Here he is.

His name is Bleu. He is very, very sweet. As I was trying to pet the cat in the cage diagonal from his, he was reaching through the bars for me.

He is also very, very energetic. He bolts from one side of the house to the other and climbs furniture and jumps on tables and knocks things off. He’s a curious boy and currently gets into everything. We haven’t had a kitten in over a decade, so having him around has required some adjustments.

Sneaker, our grouchy, old lady cat, is not handling his presence very well. She should be used to having another cat around because she lived with Max for so long. Apparently, she does not have the same patience for a baby. We’ve had a lot of literal hissy fits.

Stranger Things is a somewhat new Netflix show that we watched really quickly because it was really good.

One of the most interesting characters is Eleven. This is her.

Due to her role as a subject of questionable science experiments, she has psychokinetic abilities she can use to toss people around like rag dolls whenever she feels the need. Also due to growing up in a shady lab, she has poor social skills.

She also has a lot of moments in which she longs to be normal, even though she isn’t entirely sure what that entails. Her mix of naivety and violent tendencies makes her interesting to watch throughout the show, but one scene stood out more than the other.

So, she has a bit of a falling out with her newfound friends and she runs off. With no home and no one supporting her, she has to fend for herself, ie eat. She walks into a grocery store, straight to the Eggo waffles (because #corporatesponsorship). A couple of concerned employees, one of them a manager, asks if she needs help.

She glares at him calls him a “mouthbreather” (a term her friends taught her that refers to ignorant people), and she makes off with 4 boxes of waffles, leaving all sorts of chaos on her wake.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it shows how she really feels about regular humans, or at least regular, adult humans. She’s keenly aware of her superiority and willing to use her powers to get what she wants; God help you if you even look like you might get in her way.

Second, this scene shows that Eleven has the potential to become a very bad person in the future. For the most part, she has acted on the side of good, protecting her friends at all costs. However, if she pops up in the next season, I will be interested to see how her character changes.